Mortal Beings

Death is often understood as an intrusion upon life—something unnatural or gone wrong. Contemporary culture is increasingly preoccupied with defying the phenomenon of age: preserving youth, extending longevity, and imagining the possibility of overcoming mortality altogether. Our conception of mortality is prone to centralizing the human body experience, but overlooks the fact that death is constantly occurring around us.

“We can understand the phenomenon of death in the animal if we first consider it in the order next below us—the vegetable,” Thoreau writes, noting also that “death is beautiful when seen to be law, and not an accident… When we look over the fields we are not saddened because these particular flowers or grasses will wither.” Werner Herzog, from a seemingly opposing perspective, describes the natural order as “the harmony of overwhelming and collective murder,” observing struggle, consumption, obscenity, and decay. While one finds acceptance where the other finds horror, both arrive at a similar recognition: death is inseparable from the natural order.

The making of these works deals directly with the idea of demise as generative. I gather botanical material from outside my studio, repeatedly coating the plants in liquid porcelain before subjecting them to the extreme heat of firing. The process involves a violent transition: in the kiln, the organic body is incinerated, while the porcelain surrounding it is vitrified into an enduring ceramic form—shifting the plant’s ephemeral existence onto an entirely different timescale. Despite the destruction, what emerges is not annihilation, but another state of being.

Mortal Beings does not attempt to reconcile the beauty and brutality of the natural world. Instead, the exhibition recognizes them as inseparable. Through an examination of material, plant, and animal life, the work looks beyond the human body for ways of understanding death and grief. Across vastly different scales of existence, living requires continual passages between states—growth and decomposition, preservation and destruction, death and regeneration. Mortality is not the opposite of being alive, but one of its conditions.

View: Ray Drew Gallery